Bleak is in on television — from zombie apocalypses to Red Weddings to meth-dealing high school teachers — but HBO’s “True Detective” is taking its audience on an odyssey to even grimmer places.

The murder-mystery show, which has been getting good ratings and buzz, is disturbing, but not necessarily because of its lurid imagery, violence, and explicit sex and nudity. What’s intriguing is that a show that’s such a big hit features so prominently a dark philosophy which suggests that humanity is an error of evolution and ultimately meaningless, and that we should stop reproducing.

The planned anthology series, the first season of which is written by novelist Nic Pizzolatto and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, focuses on Detectives Rustin Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson) as they investigate a brutal, ritualistic murder of a woman in 1995 and are also questioned by two other detectives 17 years later after a similar murder, even though Cohle and Hart supposedly caught the original killer. Hart and Cohle are practically opposites. Hart, at least on the surface, is the more sociable, traditional, macho, family man type of cop, while Cohle, whose marriage fell apart after his young daughter died in a car accident, is darker, more aloof. Cohle, when pressed, tells Hart he’s a pessimist, but he doesn’t mean “pessimist” in the everyday sense of simply being a sourpuss who’s “bad at parties.” He says he’s a pessimist in his worldview, the philosophical sense, although he pushes beyond mere pessimism and into anti-natalist territory. Here’s Cohle:

I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

Chew on that for a second. The (mostly) sympathetic lead character of a major television show — albeit one who hallucinates and suffers from insomnia — is calling humanity an aberration while saying that we should simply run out the clock as a species. When I heard McConaughey utter these lines in his spaced-out drawl, it reminded me vividly of the philosophical writing of Thomas Ligotti (“Teatro Grottesco,” “My Work Is Not Yet Done”), a writer known throughout the literary horror world for his disturbing and blackly funny short works in the genre known as weird fiction.

In his 2010 nonfiction work, the Bram Stoker Award-nominated “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,” Ligotti calls consciousness “the parent of all horrors” and lays out an argument that would make Rustin Cohle offer a slow, stoned nod of approval. Since Cohle says these things in 1995, maybe in this fictional reality he goes on to write a tract similar to Ligotti’s. He also refers to humans as “biological puppets,” a prominent idea in Ligotti’s arguments and a motif in his fiction.

Here are some examples of Ligotti writing on nature and humanity in “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race”:

Now we know that we are uncanny paradoxes. We know that nature has veered into the supernatural by fabricating a creature that cannot and should not exist by natural law, and yet does.

And:

And the worst possible thing we could know — worse than knowing of our descent from a mass of microorganisms — is that we are nobodies not somebodies, puppets not people.

And:

For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void. To end this self-deception, to free our species of the paradoxical imperative to be and not to be conscious, our backs breaking by degrees upon a wheel of lies, we must cease reproducing.

Cohle’s viewpoint, at least three episodes into the season’s eight entries, is the prevailing one on the show, illustrated by scenes of Hart’s swaggering braggadocio faltering before the skepticism posited by his partner. Then consider the steamy backwoods Louisiana setting, seething with dread, evoking the pessimist philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, who saw an indomitable and indifferent will, not reason, as the force that drives existence. For the horror reader, this sort of consideration should bring to mind the likes of H.P. Lovecraft, to whom Ligotti is often considered a literary heir.

This is a detective show, but the echoes of the bleak tradition of weird fiction don’t stop with Ligotti or Lovecraft. We learn in “True Detective” that the murder victim, Dora Lange, had said she had met a “king,” and that she kept a diary in which she mentioned “the Yellow King” and “Carcosa.” These come from Robert Chambers’ 1895 collection of weird stories, “The King in Yellow,” in which several of the stories are connected by a fictional play, about the titular ruler, which drives to insanity whoever reads it. (Chambers, likewise, took Carcosa from an Ambrose Bierce short story.) Chambers’ writing inspired Lovecraft’s work on what came to be known as the “Cthulhu Mythos.” Lovecraft even co-opted parts of Chambers’ mythology to include in his monstrous pantheon of “gods” and otherworldly locations.

There are plenty of episodes left for this to turn around, of course. Cohle’s Ligotti-esque worldview could be exposed as fraudulent, a posture, and Pizzolatto and Co. could be sneering at it and having some dark laughs at its expense. In the third episode, there is a scene at a revival ministry in a tent where his pious anti-religious declarations make him sound like a jerk. But two things give me pause: First is Cohle’s poignant, if warped, reflection on his daughter’s death and mortality in general:

I think about my daughter now and what she was spared. Sometimes I feel grateful. The doctor said she didn’t feel a thing, went straight into a coma. Then, somewhere in that blackness, she slipped off into another deeper kind. Isn’t that a beautiful way to go out — painlessly as a happy child? Trouble with dying later is you’ve already grown up, the damage is done too late. I think about the hubris it must take to yank a soul out of nonexistence into this. Force a life into this thresher. As for my daughter, she spared me the sin of being a father.

Second is the condition of the detectives in 2012: Cohle, devastated and alcoholic, more ruined and despairing than even in 1995; Hart, plumper, out of the police force and running his own security concern, but relatively unchanged at his core, full of denial and rationalization, and conspicuously lacking a wedding ring. This indicates that at the center of “True Detective” beats a black heart, and that existence itself is the culprit in the show’s central crime, which is not necessarily the murder of Dora Lange, but the tragedy of humanity. As my friend and colleague Marshall Crook suggested in his review of the second episode, the series could end up “as bleak as it gets” following the lead of Chambers and Lovecraft — even if there is no supernatural element, and there doesn’t appear to be — as well as a philosophy similar to Ligotti’s.

Yet, it could also be revolutionary television. Millions of viewers are hearing Cohle’s worldview weekly, and many might just find that it makes some kind of troubling sense.

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.